The Pentagon Proclaims Failure in its War on Terror in Africa - TomDispatch.com

The Pentagon Proclaims Failure in its War on Terror in Africa - TomDispatch.com Nick Turse, The Epicenter of International Terrorism November 14, 2023 I started this website in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and the launching of what President George W. Bush quickly labeled "the Global War on Terror." And here we are, 22 years after Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld stood in the ruins of the Pentagon and told an aide, “Near term target needs -- go massive -- sweep it all up, things related and not.” In retrospect, that "and not" proved almost beyond imagining. The invaluable Costs of War Project has estimated, for instance, that, thanks directly to the war on terror, nearly one million people on this planet have died and at least 3.6 million deaths were related, however indirectly, to it. So, it's worth asking: Did anyone or any institution benefit from all that war-making (other than some still spreading terror groups)? Well, you could certainly say that the U.S. military did. Forget that it proved truly victorious nowhere in the more than two decades that followed 9/11, and just consider that it's now the most well-financed military on the planet by a country mile. Within the next few years, its annual budget could reach a trillion dollars, no small thing for a military that, in this century, has proven capable of winning so little. Just imagine that, after so many years of failure, this country now accounts for nearly 40% of all military expenditures on Planet Earth, more than the next 10 countries combined. Wouldn't you call that a victory of the first order? Stranger yet, after so many years -- despite disasters from Afghanistan to Iraq and beyond -- as TomDispatch regular and managing editor Nick Turse makes strikingly clear in his latest piece, that all-too-well-funded military is still fighting the war President Bush launched against terror groups, even if now on a continent that few Americans think about: Africa. Let Turse, who has followed this country's African (mis)adventures in a way no other reporter has, fill you in on its never-ending set of conflicts there and the terror groups that help it go on, and on, and on, and on. Tom